1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a server apparatus used in a system for delivering a commercial stream and a main-program stream of a content via a network, a trick reproduction restriction method, and a reception apparatus that receives and reproduces the streams.
2. Description of the Related Art
Along with prevalence of a high-speed data communication network, services of delivering streams of various contents such as a moving image and music using a VOD (Video On Demand) system are becoming popular. As a form of this type of service, a system of delivering a commercial stream (hereinafter, referred to as “CM stream”) at least before delivering a stream of a main program (hereinafter, referred to as “main-program stream”) of a content and letting a user view a CM is generally used.
As a method of realizing such a service, a method of integrating a CM stream and a main-program stream at a source level to manage them as a CM-attached content, and delivering a stream of the CM-attached content in response to a viewing request from the user is generally used.
By this method, however, since the main-program stream and the CM stream are coupled at the source level, the CM stream cannot be easily replaced with other streams. In other words, encode processing of an entire stream including the main-program stream and the CM stream of the content needs to be carried out every time the CM stream is replaced, which is inefficient.
There is known a system that uses a relay apparatus that relays, to a terminal of a viewer, a main-program stream and a CM stream respectively provided from a content server apparatus that provides main-program streams and a CM server apparatus that provides CM streams. In this system, the relay apparatus switches the streams to be delivered by the content server apparatus and the CM server apparatus in accordance with a preset commercial insertion schedule. As a result, a reorganization task of the CM-attached content at a source level becomes unnecessary, and a CM stream to be attached to the main-program stream can be replaced with ease (see, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2004-364001).